Never trust a survivor until you know what they did to survive. Those are words to live by after my experience with the cruise that left Miami headed to the Bahamas crashed. There were so many souls on board, a total of 183 to be exact, but only a handful of survivors.

The ship had left port on a Friday evening, 8pm to be exact; and was full of excitement. As it left the dock there was the typical good bye waves and streamers. The people on board were happy and ready to get away for two weeks. Little did they know at the time for many of them this would be the last trip of their life.

The mayday call came in on Sunday morning. The Coast Guard was dispatched to where the signal had originated, but there was no ship to be found. There was an extensive search invovling ships, helicopters, and airplanes but there was no site of any survivors. As the days and then weeks went by people began to lose hope that anyone would be found. Finally after a month the search was called off, but there was still hope. I was one of those that held that hope and took my airplane out every day to see if I could find any signs.

Finally after three months I was flying over an island that was over a hundred miles away and saw what looked like a fire, and then there it was the S.O.S formed by rocks on the beach. I saw people waving their hands in the air. I’m sure they were yelling as well but I didn’t hear them due to the airplanes engine. I called in their location to the authorities and they picked them up.

Since I had found the survivors, Thirty-three in all, I was privy to some of the information of their ordeal. It seems as though the ship had an explosion in the engine compartment. The crew attempted to put it out but it was pointless. In a matter of hours the ship was ablaze and people were scrambling to get into the life boats. The captain who was one of the survivors ordered the food reserves to put into one boat, but they could only get so much on board before they had to put it in the water, this is where things got ugly.

“You did what?” The commander of the Coast Guard asked, “We had to start killing people if we wanted to survive, so we started killing passengers one by one. We needed to have order and my crew was the only ones I could trust. We didn’t know the passengers, and we knew it would be chaos so we shot them and took another two boats with food.”

The commander’s eyes were wide as saucers as he looked at the other officer in the room. I couldn’t believe my ears when I heard this and thought to myself _It is truly amazing what people will do to survive._ The crew of the ship was charged with murder and the cruise line was shut down.

I don’t think I will ever forget that story, and wish I could.